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Does Mitt Romney’s long love affair with Canada still have heat?

The Republican front-runner has deep roots, treasured memories and a family cottage north of the 49th parallel &mdash; but will that help Canada if he&rsquo;s elected president?

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney looks on during a rally at Exeter High School on Jan. 8 in Exeter, New Hampshire. (Justin Sullivan / GETTY IMAGES)

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Subject: PLS put into Newsgate. Thank you very much. On 2012-01-10, at 2:24 PM, Colbourn, Glen wrote: The Romney family cottage facing west towards Lake Huron is in the gated community of Beach o' Pines. Mitt Romney and his siblings still own the property bought by their father George in 1950 for $31,900. BILL SCHILLER/TORONTO STAR IMG_3967.JPG (Bill Schiller / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Mitch Potter and Bill SchillerToronto Star

Sat., Jan. 14, 2012

GRAND BEND—It is the dead of winter in Canada, but a white-sided cottage on a sandy ridge overlooking Lake Huron will always be a summer place for U.S. presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. It is where he spent his summers at the beach, enjoyed fireworks on Independence Day and watched his handsome, silver-haired father George, then governor of Michigan, swim in the lake.

It all happened in a Canadian cocoon, a tiny, gated community called Beach o’ Pines which hugs the shore near Grand Bend.

The elder Romney, who died in 1995, jokingly called himself a “Summer Canadian.”

Youngest son Mitt still clings to those memories — and the Canadian property.

Six decades after his father paid $31,900 in 1950 for a 52-metre lakefront lot, Mitt and his siblings still own it, still use it and still keep their telephone number in the local directory under “G. Romney.”

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It’s one of several vacation properties Mitt Romney owns. But this one has special significance.

“You can understand why they hold on to it,” says Bob Sharen, a long-time local realtor. “For many families, a cottage is where their happiest memories live.”

It might also be the place where Romney first learned from his mentor-father how to be a cool customer: from childhood summers, through business and on into politics, how to manage his feelings out of the equation.

It was an easy drive from Detroit, where the elder Romney was an auto executive before entering politics. You could cross the border with just a driver’s licence, or a friendly chat and a nod.

Detroit was different then and so was America. The car was king and the city had clout.

There’s no historic plaque yet amid these pines. And from all appearances, the cottage remains pretty much the same as always, despite Mitt amassing a fortune believed to be as high as $250 million.

But if Romney becomes the 45th president of the United States, the plaque will come — and so will heightened security the next time he visits. At present, Beach o’ Pines is guarded only by an unmanned security gate.

The family always fit in well here, says Sharen, 72: “They never kept to themselves.”

Neighbours say they did what others did — boating, bridge, grocery shopping.

Despite criticism from political adversaries that Mitt was born into privilege, neighbour Dick Matzka, 63, insists the Romneys carried themselves like regular cottagers.

“There was never any ‘big time’ deal with them,” recalls the Michigan native. “They were just ‘beach friends.’ Straightforward. Honest. You never got that feeling of ‘Hey, we’re more important.’”

So, given this comfortable cross-border history, is it safe to assume that Mitt Romney has the warm and cuddlies for Canada?

Don’t count on it.

One example: Romney’s treatment of the Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers, an annual gathering that mattered — until Romney arrived in September 2003 as the newly minted governor of Massachusetts.

His predecessors, Governors Paul Cellucci and Mike Dukakis, attached importance to the conference, where leaders of Quebec and the four Atlantic provinces shared ideas with counterparts from Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts.

But as a marathon session in 2003 dragged on in Mystic, Conn., Romney grew exasperated, according to sources.

A Harvard Business School grad and co-founder of Bain Capital, Romney had been steeled in the private sector. He was a one-hour meeting kind of guy. All else was to be delegated. Yet there he was, eight hours into one of the longest meetings of his working life — and his eyes were glazing over.

“You never actually saw Romney angry. He had a presence as very bright and polished — engaged, to some extent — but also very reserved,” one Canadian delegate in attendance said on condition of anonymity.

The conference, as it turned out, would lose its big fish. Romney said he was skipping the following year’s meeting in Newfoundland, and lesser American fish followed. The meeting was cancelled.

Romney never attended another regional conference. From then on, he sent delegates.

Canadian officials downplay the snub, noting it’s always a chore getting New England governors to the cross-border table. “They take the all-politics-is-local thing to an extreme in that part of the states,” said one. “You can’t just say to a Romney, ‘Sit with us because you love Canada and we all play hockey.’ That doesn’t wash. The Canadian approach is that we always have to work hard to spell out for them why it’s worth their while.”

But in the post-9/11 era, with so much of the cross-border wiring frayed by security concerns, Canadian disappointment was real. Coming on the heels of the cozier Paul Cellucci era — which coincided with Howard Dean’s governorship in Vermont — Canadians were getting accustomed to dealing with governors who were keen on Canada. “The engagement (then) was wonderful.”

But under Mitt Romney and a fresh slate of inward-looking governors, it all had to be re-earned.

Matt Keswick, a Boston consultant, has a unique perspective into Romney’s take on Canada. A former adviser to Romney’s campaigns for the senate and the governorship, Keswick consults widely with Canadian businesses looking to grow in the U.S.

“I think it’s important to remember that when Romney came in as governor, he came in as a business person determined to look not only at policy, but also process,” said Keswick. “Very quickly he created two super agencies in Massachusetts that combined the work of a dozen branches. It became two or three kingdoms led by the equivalent of executive VPs reporting up to him.

“So his style is to delegate to trusted deputies. He may not be at every meeting that involves Canada. But he definitely will know what transpired.”

Keswick continues: “The thing to remember is that in Romney you have a potential president who is extraordinarily well-briefed on Canada. And not just because he spent his summer vacations there — don’t forget his dad was a car guy. Growing up in Michigan, crossing that bridge into Canada, taking in the scope and importance of the relationship all these years — it all adds up to a depth of first-hand knowledge.”

When Detroit’s car companies ran aground in the 2008 recession, Mitt was anything but sentimental. His prescription, published in a New York Times op-ed piece was blunt: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” read the headline. He insisted it was far better to manage the bankruptcies of car companies and force them to cut costs, downsize and innovate than to bail them out.

The result? Detroit’s car companies are turning the corner and repaying their loans. GM has paid back $23 billion of $51 billion, while Chrysler has paid back $7 billion of nearly $11 billion.

Romney opponents hammered him for “being out of touch” with reality. His defenders saw his auto industry prescription as nothing more than signature tough-mindedness.

But that tough-mindedness is now increasingly under attack. An onslaught of negative advertising is airing to discredit Romney’s time with Bain Capital, the Boston-based investment firm he helped found in 1984. The messages raise the spectre that Bain was run with predatory instincts.

The ads will multiply as Romney draws closer to the Republican nomination. Was Romney really a job creator or a job cremator?

If Bain Capital’s forays into Canada are any gauge, the answer is “both.” In deals involving some of Canada’s best-known brands, including Dollarama, Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP) and Shoppers Drug Mart, jobs were both created and destroyed.

The Dollarama deal was a sweet one for Bain. The Bombardier transaction, not so much.

The maker of Ski-Doo, Sea-Doo and other toys for grownups has had a rough ride since Bain took a 50 per cent stake in the company in December 2003. Already struggling to maintain market share, BRP got walloped by the recession and saw its revenues plummet 40 per cent. Under Bain it shed more than 25 per cent of its 7,500 employees worldwide — including more than 1,000 in Quebec.

Plants in the U.S., Canada and China were sold, the Quebec government coughed up $80 million in emergency loans and only now is BRP showing signs of recovery. Bain’s ultimate investment strategy however has thus far failed to live up to the Romney model. After the better part of a decade, BRP’s planned initial public offering is still on the shelf.

Perhaps more interesting is Bain Capital’s home run with Dollarama. A one-buck-wonder in November 2004 when Bain took 80 per cent ownership for $850 million (U.S.), Dollarama mushroomed into an empire of close to 700 stores by the time the Boston overseers cashed out their last chip in 2011. Bain’s total payback is believed to have exceeded $1 billion.

Like the deal with Bombardier Recreational Products, Bain’s leveraged buyout of Dollarama came after Romney had shifted into politics. But the Dollarama saga followed the Romney model perfectly: invest big with mostly borrowed money; keep the original owners involved; insert Bain business commandos at the top; pull down handsome management fees and expand rapidly.

For Bain, the Dollarama deal was a whopping success and jobs have been created. But critics complain they are low-end “McJobs,” with a Dollarama army of minimum-wage earners serving up tonnes of cheap Chinese imports.

And therein lies another sore point. Dollarama’s sub-Wal-mart approach of pouring shiploads of irresistibly inexpensive Chinese wares into Canada is a bad fit for a Romney campaign given to China-bashing.

During last weekend’s New Hampshire debates Romney again thumped the populist tub against China, accusing it of “stealing our jobs, hacking into our computers and manipulating our currency.”

Of course the hustings are built for such rhetoric, and few analysts really believe Romney would invite a trade war. If one materialized, it would fly in the face of the retail success of Dollarama that paid Romney’s former partners handsomely.

Canadian Olympic official Dick Pound saw some of that rescue up close, as a member of the IOC executive committee. He was impressed.

Rocked by a corruption scandal that led to criminal charges against senior Salt Lake officials, Romney arrived like a white knight, transforming the games into a solid success.

It was no pro-bono effort. Records show Romney was paid $1.42 million.

“Frankly Salt Lake was bloody lucky that Mitt was there, that someone like him existed and that he was willing to do the job,” says Pound. “It was a really messy situation.”

Pound recalls Romney as highly organized and “very confident about making decisions.”

In Pound’s view that’s where he honed his leadership skills, working with people who were putting together different elements of a problem and making them all work together.

“He is skilful, knowledgeable and focused,” says Pound, who has met Romney “many times” and entertained him in his own home in Montreal, where Romney once had dinner with Pound, his wife and two of his children.

“He was very personable,” says Pound, “very cheerful.”

Pound was surprised when Romney failed to win the Republican nomination in 2007.

“I remember saying to him, ‘Your country is nuts. They had a chance to pick you and instead they chose that other twosome (John McCain and Sarah Palin)?’ That’s scary.”

Reported in the Boston Globe in 2007, the story has become legendary.

Romney put Seamus, the family’s Irish setter, into a dog carrier that Romney had fashioned with a windshield for the dog’s comfort, then strapped the carrier to the roof of their Chevy station wagon and set off.

There would be pre-determined stops for gas only, Romney had told his boys. Nothing was to prevent them from arriving on time.

But along the way one Romney son spied a brown liquid oozing from the roof down across the back windshield.

“Dad!” he shouted. “Gross!”

Romney promptly steered into a gas station, borrowed a hose to clean the dog, then the container, as well as the windshield, and they were back on the highway — with Seamus still on the roof. Everybody arrived in Canada safe and sound.

So would a President Romney be good for Canada?

“Ninety-nine per cent of Americans, when you mention Canada, get sort of blurry and vague,” says Pound. “They’ve heard of it, but it’s ‘up there.’ And they’re pretty sure it’s cold.

“But he’s been here. He knows what it’s like in what is basically the heartland of country. And that should help.”

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